Dynamic Difficulty Levels: PvE game design theory at work (Destiny)

by Kahzgul, Tuesday, December 26, 2017, 12:49 (2365 days ago)

edit: TL;DR for those who don't want to read my latest novel: Destiny has game systems which work at odds with one another, creating an environment which begs players to play how they want to while simultaneously shoehorning players into playing only in the few ways that Bungie wants them to play.

Second subheadline: How Diablo 3 and Destiny totally blew it on their implementation of levels on both players and enemies.

I've seen posts around this sub for years that talk about how there should be difficulty levels you choose when you start a game, or select an event to participate in, etc.. Or that say difficulty levels are for babies who want everything handed to them instead of wanted to git gud. Both opinions are, in my opinion, incorrect when it comes to games like Destiny.

Why?

Well, I'm going to get more general first: Games where both the player has a level and the enemies have levels are games which should not require difficulty levels, but which also should - somewhat dynamically - allow players to (eventually) access all of the content of the game and complete all of the challenges therein.

How?

In any game where the player and enemies have levels, difficulty scales dynamically: as the player levels up relative to the enemies, the game should get easier, and as the enemies level up relative to the player, the game should get harder. In more literal terms, a level 10 player should wipe the floor with level 1 enemies, and a level 1 player should have a nearly impossible task trying to defeat level 10 enemies.

What does this do?

Water finds its own level, as the saying goes. Players in a dynamic leveling system such as this will find a challenge level for which they are comfortable on a moment to moment basis. Too easy for you? Blow through the next few levels and bam, you're back at a challenging pace. Too hard? Come back later after you've leveled up a bit in easier areas.

This how classic RPGs have historically played. In almost every case, and certainly in every case that I consider to have been well designed, a skilled player is able to complete the game somewhere around the mid-levels of the game, and poor players are able to dramatically out-level the content in the game in order to breeze through the final fights. Highly skilled and knowledgeable "professional" caliber players are able to complete the game at levels which seem, to the rest of us, nearly impossible.

In my opinion, the single best implementation of character and enemy levels in any game, ever, is Diablo 2.

Which is why Diablo 3 mystifies me in the extreme. In every zone of the game, the monsters scale to your level. There is no method by which the player can go to an easier zone or a more challenging zone. Rather, Blizzard tacked a difficulty selection screen on top of their game which was already designed with both player and monster levels already implemented. It's bonkers, backwards, and bad, as far as I'm concerned.

Destiny is exactly half as bad. Namely: Monsters which out-level you make the game more challenging, but once you reach a monster's level, they never become easier as you gain further levels. This means you could theoretically increase challenge by fighting higher level monsters, but you can never outlevel them to make for an easy ride later on.

Of course, Destiny wasn't really designed to be played in a linear progression. Or, rather, the linear progression of Destiny is entirely contained within the story campaign, and that campaign is designed such that for most players you are always playing against monsters who are at or slightly above your current level. In fact, the campaign *prevents* you from proceeding into higher level missions, even if you want to, until you reach a certain level. Again, bonkers and bad.

If the monsters are going to roflstomp most players anyway, why block them from entering? Just make a tooltip that says "Campaign enemies too hard? You can level up in other activities to make enemies easier to defeat." There's no reason to stop players from entering while grossly underleveled. Suggested power is great. Enforced power is lame in a system like this.

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Let's look at the "endgame" of a few games that deal with relative power level in different ways. Not all of these will be familiar to all of you, but I'll try to explain how each is handled. Then I'll come back to Destiny and talk about how Destiny's design whiffs on taking advantage of the strengths of player and enemy levels.

Diablo 2: The main game is completable by level 30 for most players. Then there is a "nightmare mode" which sounds at first like a difficulty selection (as it is a repeat of the normal campaign), but is actually a linear progression from the normal mode enemy levels. Nightmare is completable around level 60 for most players, and then hell mode is completable around level 90. Players can level up to 99, putting them easily 10% more powerful than the hardest content in the game. For some players, being the most powerful player they can be is the goal, and they level to 99 as much as possible. For others, the challenge of beating the whole game quickly and at low a level as possible is the goal, and some have done it around level 60. For others, simply completing the story was the point, and they're done after level 30 or so with an enjoyable experience and without feeling the need to join the power struggle in the repeated campaigns (but increased enemy levels) of nightmare and hell modes. "endgame" of diablo 2 is by and large the race to complete Hell and gather the most powerful gear possible for your character. One last thing: Diablo 2 also features seasons, where servers are reset and all players start over from level 1. These seasons are timed out such that it is very hard, yet still possible, to reach level 99 before the next reset, and provide a clean player economy and fair starting line for all players. This extends the life of the game effectively forever, as the endgame resets with each season, provided you're a seasonal type player. There are other incentives, such as special drops that only happen during the current season etc. in order to keep people playing on the new ladders rather than sticking with their old characters.

Kingdom of Loathing: I opine about this game with regularity here, and that's because it is novel in many ways. Unlimited inventory, full and un-policed player trading and selling of items in a searchable "mall," and almost no restrictions on how you play the game. After completing the main story, you have the option to restart at the beginning, but you can make one of your skills from the last playthrough permanent for all future playthroughs, like a super prestige mode. Not only does this extend the life of the campaign, but it also creates a metagame whereby players are completing the main game as quickly as possible in order to make permanent as many of the skills as possible, and also to compete for fastest ever clear times on the leaderboards. KoL does prevent you from completing each story mission if you're underleveled (you gain access to them via leveling up), but the nature of the game means that a large part of the early metagame is optimizing your leveling up abilities such that you can access the final missions in the least number of turns per run. Players who are good at the game are able to optimize "no skill" runs and still do well, whereas players who are not so good can continue to add more and more skills to their repertoire in order to make life easier for their runs. If you aren't interested in the metagame, the main missions end at level 13, but there are "endgame" content areas at level 20 and above, and players can also level up infinitely in order to far exceed the power level of whatever comes their way. Because this game is played based on turns per day, being infinitely powerful still doesn't allow you do defeat everything all at once - you have to marshal your turns and use them appropriately.

Mordor: Depths of Dejenol: God I loved this game. In addition to your character's level and enemy levels, you also had item levels, which sometimes required minimum stats, but which could allow you to punch above your level, so to speak. Since the in-game store was persistent character to character, you could use your powerful main character to essentially twink out your other characters, who would then gain experience quickly by defeating overleveled monsters, eventually arriving at similar power to your main character. You could then party them together, and take on more difficult challenges. As with both previous games, the race to finish was not a forced difficulty setting - you could always just farm the level 1 monsters endlessly and still get at least 1 exp per kill, allowing you to overlevel harder areas (eventually) and make them all somewhat trivial, were you to pour in the absolute hours of time and energy needed to farm exp that way. I don't know what the endgame of this game was like, because I never even got close to finishing, even after several hundred hours of play. There was just so much depth here, and all so well implemented. God I wish this game would be ported to modern systems.

Fallout: New Vegas: Another game with a colon in its title. Fallout (and many of the other Bethesda games such as Morrowind, Fallout 3, Fallout 4, Skyrim) all do an interesting thing with monster levels. As the player becomes more powerful, the enemies the player encounters also become more powerful, but not in a 'diablo 3' terrible scaling sort of way. Rather, the player encounters different types of enemies which are, by the nature of their typing, more powerful. Compare to Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, where all monsters scale exactly like Diablo 3, and the difference is obvious: There are some enemies which at level 1 are very easy, but at level 60 are nearly impossible to kill simply because they scale too steeply. In F:NV and the others, a radroach is always just a radroach, but at level 30 you're more likely to encounter a Deathclaw alongside that radroach. So you get the powerful feeling of being able to roflstomp the low level enemies while still encountering a somewhat scaled difficulty of seeing more powerful types of enemies as you explore. Unlike a Diablo 3 or Destiny design, this allows players to identify the difficulty of approaching enemies and decide whether or not the player is up to the challenge in advance. Even so, at some point the enemies cap out, and the player is allowed to continue to level well beyond their strength if they so choose. These games are important in this discussion as an alternative example of how to both scale enemies (via typing) without ruining the interaction of player levels vs. enemy levels.

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So let's look back at Destiny now. When the D1 beta was released, I was very excited that this game seemed to be properly using levels. There were level 20 guys in the level 8 zone who would just stomp you and prevent you from accessing those high level areas! Wow! I was so excited to reach level 20, come back, and see what lay beyond! Turns out it was a single chest. Or maybe a ghost shell. Or literally nothing, in some cases. How disappointing. Enemy levels were not being used as dynamic gates to higher level zones, but rather as singular mini-bosses to nuke new players while providing virtually no challenge for fully leveled ones.

Furthermore, my friend who sucked at the game (sorry dude!) had an awful time, constantly getting mobbed by enemies he should have far outleveled. Ultimately he quit because he couldn't play the way he wanted to (just charging in like a maniac) even in the noobiest of noob zones. Without casting judgement on the validity of wanting to play this way, I want to point out: In a traditional player level vs. enemy level model, it is possible to grossly overlevel the content and then run in like a madman laying waste to anyone and everyone as you go. Any game in which both the player and the enemies have levels should allow for this sort of play.

It's not to say that Destiny's design is all bad. There's something to be said for bringing the baseline of enemy levels up to the player in order to prevent true trivialization of content. That works in a game like destiny to keep every world remains "current" in the endgame and nothing is actually gated by enemy level at that point. The expense of this desire to keep all areas active in the endgame is that you lose the value of having levels in the first place. Why even have them at all? And this is a question I and others have asked repeatedly in D2: Why have character levels and power levels at all in this game? What purpose do they serve? The answer, basically, is that they give players a bigger number to chase that is ultimately meaningless beyond bragging rights.

Of course, this begs another question: Why cap power level at all? The number doesn't mean anything other than you've spent an awful lot of time collecting gear, so why not reward those collectors with an unlimited "power" level creep that they can use in their epeen measuring contests?

Look, I can't answer why Destiny was designed the way it was without getting very pessimistic. It all reeks of addictive hooks and making sure the game is full of "one more thing" to keep players playing and chasing the dragon, so to speak. None of it looks like smart design in terms of game mechanics and dynamic difficulty to me. Destiny 1 accepted this failure and added difficulty levels to missions and strikes. Destiny 2 is in full denial and basically says "if the game is too hard, you suck, and if the game is too easy, tough luck buddy, get used to it."

The whole game (and Bungie's current design philosophy in general) seems to be about "play the game the way we intended or not at all" and that's essentially the antithesis of a persistent loot RNG-based sandbox game. If you want us to play a certain way, fix our loadouts and remove the dynamic world elements. Otherwise, get the design out of the way of player choice and let people do what they want to, up to and including overleveling enemies or preventing themselves from gaining more experience in order to increase the difficulty of the game via more natural means.

I believe that this dichotomy of developer attitude and design scope plays a significant role in player dissatisfaction with the experience of the game.